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For Mac users, the good old days werenâ€™t always so good. Youâ€™d go into a store to find some software, and be told there were very few titles for Mac users, or youâ€™d find a few dusty boxes in the rear, in some out-of-the shelf. Even if you managed to locate something that appealed to you, it was most likely a long-outdated version.

Indeed, some suggest that Appleâ€™s missteps in those years left the platform eternally doomed to niche status. Macs were expensive toys for the well-heeled, although they were cherished by graphic artists and musicians. Clearly they knew something the rest of the personal computing world didnâ€™t.

I was told over and over again that real computers required mastering command lines and understanding rudimentary programming at the very last. And no wonder, because sometimes doing simple things required extraordinary efforts.

Take the time a colleague at work wanted to exchange messages with me via a bulletin board system. I had the software up and running on my Mac at home in just a few minutes. But each time I asked him if he was ready, he talked about having to create a â€œshellâ€ to run a telecommunications session.